In recent years, a plethora of critical voices have come to question the underlying foundations of local state structures by introducing new understandings of scale and spatial boundaries, reconfiguring in the process how we theorise the ‘local’ and its political practices. This panel offers a timely and renewed reassessment of these critical reconfigurations of the local. In so doing, it puts practice at the centre of its inquiry. It explores how far the critical evaluation of practice can serve as a focal point for an interdisciplinary dialogue over the spatial ‘realities’ of ‘doing’ local politics and policy-making, as well as providing new groundings for the normative underpinnings and justifications for local democratic spaces Put alternatively, in seeking to open a dialogue between innovative ways of ‘seeing’ local governance, this panel questions whether we are witnessing the emergence of what might be termed a ‘new’ critical approach to the spaces and logics of the local.